Systems Cowboy » Wordpress

Aweber WordPress Integration

Systems Cowboy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:28:32 +0000

If you use Aweber to manage your mailing list, this Aweber integration plugin works great – it gives you a little widget you can add to your signbar that has your Aweber signup box:

Aweber Integration Plugin.

Essential WordPress Plugins

Systems Cowboy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:10:09 +0000

There are a handful of WordPress plugins that I wind up using almost every time:

All in One SEO – Standard. Handles meta tags and titles.
Google XML Sitemaps. Gotta have a sitemap for Google. This does it automatically.
Restore Post ID. After you tweak your Permalinks for SEO, the latest version of WordPress makes it difficult to find out the post ID for your pages and posts. You need these for certain functions, like including or excluding the page from the main navigation. This plugin makes the post ID’s show in the admin interface again. Just makes it easier.
No Category Base. This makes it so your blog doesn’t have to have a category base like www.myurl.com/category/blog-post.html. Instead, your URL can look like www.myurl.com/blog-post.html.

Other plugins I use often:

WP-Table-Reloaded. Excellent if you need to display data in tables in your blog.
WP-Postratings. Great for allowing reader to rate a post 1-4 stars. Looks nice.

Two excellent paid (not free) plugins:

Caffeinated Content. Automatically creates relevant blog content. Can be good for SEO.
Ninja Affiliate. Makes it easy to add affiliate links in your blog. Makes the links look nice, easy to manage, and tracks clicks. Also has cloaking ability. Highly recommended.

Also: HTML on Pages puts the “.html” back on your pages and Automatic SEO Links automatically links up certain text to where you’d like it to link, which helps for SEO. Free Casino Money and Mega Moolah are a couple of sites that use these plugins.

WordPress is the Greatest

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:57:15 +0000

I love WordPress. I don’t bother “designing” or “programming” sites anymore. There are too many great templates for WordPress, it’s too easy to use, and there is a plug-in for most anything I need to do. A WordPress site doesn’t have to look like a blog, and it’s perfect for creating “mini-sites”.

Now, this subject has been covered alot online, but I’m going to talk about what I do when I set up a WordPress blog since it’s on my mind as I set up this blog today.

The first thing I do is set up Permalinks. Under settings > Permalinks > Custom Structure, I pretty much always put /%postname%.html

That makes the URL of all your posts look like www.myurl.com/my-subject-matter.html instead of www.myurl.com/?p=123.

Next, I take a couple of minutes and install several key plugins…